Athol Fugard runs his hands over the long gleaming table. It is a stage
prop, an old has-been that was lost in the shadows of a secondhand store. But
despite the dust, he immediately recognized the treasure. It is stinkwood, a
rare indigenous wood with chocolate hues and golden lights.

The table is the centerpiece of Mr. Fugard's newest play, ''Sorrows &
Rejoicings,'' which opened on Aug. 28 for a four-week run at the Baxter Theater
here. It is the unwanted inheritance of a young mixed-race woman, who is unsure
of what to keep and what to throw away from her past. It is a symbol of a modern
South Africa still wrestling with its history, and perhaps of the aging
playwright himself.

Mr. Fugard, 69, is the undisputed giant of South African theater, the defiant
white artist who championed the liberation struggle and cheered apartheid's
demise in 1994. Yet today, amid the celebration of black empowerment and African
pride, he says he finds himself feeling a bit lonely and a bit unwanted.

''I've dealt with a certain degree of -- what would be the word? -- I suppose
maybe the word would be rejection that I, as a white man, presumed to write and
give a voice to the black reality in South Africa,'' Mr. Fugard said between
sips of black coffee at the theater on a recent rainy afternoon.

''And that is the challenge in the play. That is the question. Is there
anything in the past that's worth keeping? And you know, speaking as a white
man, I would like to say, 'Yes, there is.' But I think if we were to go and talk
to the people in the Khayelitsha shacks and ask them, they'd say, 'To hell with
it.' There's definitely a tendency, an attempt to ignore the contributions that
other racial groups made to the struggle.

''People are wanting to claim their own voices and the right to speak for
themselves. So I think there's an impatience with me now. It would make, I
think, a lot of people happy if, when '94 came along, my day was over, and my
day was past.''

Mr. Fugard's beard is white now, and his hands tremble when he lifts his
coffee cup. But he is far from finished. His new play marks his first serious
attempt to describe the jubilant and uneasy world that has emerged here after
decades of white rule.

''Sorrows & Rejoicings,'' which will open in January at the Second Stage
Theater in Manhattan, tells the story of Dawid Olivier, a white liberal who
returns home to die after 17 years of exile in London. He finds ''a young, new
South Africa standing on its still wobbling legs'' and a mixed-race daughter who
hates him.

Dawid's village is typical of the unsettling mix of old and new in this
country. A mixed-race man is finally mayor, but his people -- known here as
coloreds -- still live in the townships. The black government has promised big
changes, but the shabby school for colored children is still shabby. And the
disparate lives of whites and blacks are still inextricably linked. After
Dawid's funeral his estranged white wife, Allison, and his colored maid and
mistress, Marta, gather at the stinkwood table in the house where he grew up.

This is where a young Dawid wrote poetry by candlelight. It is where he wooed
young Marta, violating the apartheid laws that banned love across color lines.
It is where he presented Allison to his family as his fianc´e, while Marta
served tea and died inside.

The flashbacks to Dawid's life are punctuated by the awkward, tentative
conversation between the two women, who are still struggling to find their
places in the new world.

Allison wrestles with the guilt of having benefited from a privileged white
life even though she opposed apartheid. ''If this had been a free country back
then, mightn't he have married you?'' Allison asks Marta. ''Had I got him, like
so many other things in my life, because in addition to all my other splendid
virtues, I had a white skin?''

Marta is battered by the resentment of her daughter, Rebecca, who loathes her
father, Dawid, and despises her mother's devotion to the white man who abandoned
them. ''I wanted to tell him how you have wasted your life waiting for him,
sweeping and dusting and cleaning in here every day as if he was coming back
tomorrow,'' Rebecca shouts at her mother.

Critics who follow Mr. Fugard's work say the play represents a return to the
racial tensions that linger in South Africa. His first post-apartheid plays,
''Valley Song,'' and ''The Captain's Tiger,'' were more personal and less
focused on the racial dynamics that informed many of his previous plays,
including ''The Blood Knot,'' ''Boesman and Lena,'' '' 'Master Harold' . . . and
the Boys'' and ''Playland.''

But for much of the post-apartheid era, critics say, Mr. Fugard has struggled
to find his voice.

''He's been an absolutely staunch pioneer, a complete trend setter, but he
lost his bearings,'' said Stephen Gray, an independent scholar who has edited
three books about Mr. Fugard. ''I didn't think the 'Valley Song' and 'The
Captain's Tiger' were the right plays for those moments. They just didn't
catch.''

Some blacks complain that critics are misguided in their continued focus on
Mr. Fugard, saying such attention neglects emerging black playwrights. Such
complaints have fueled Mr. Fugard's sense of alienation. But Mr. Gray says Mr.
Fugard may have contributed to his own sense of isolation by physically
distancing himself from South Africa.

Mr. Fugard, who owns a home in Del Mar, Calif., spends half the year in the
United States, where ''Sorrows & Rejoicings'' was written. It was the first
of his plays to be entirely written outside South Africa, he said. And it had
its premiere, not here, but at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.

''We hardly see him,'' said Mr. Gray, who lives in Johannesburg. ''In the old
days we used to get previews of everything and months and months of preliminary
workshops. He's been doing all his early work in the States. It corresponds with
a sense that he's not writing for South Africans anymore. He's writing for
overseas.'' Mr. Fugard denies that he has lost touch with his country. He owns
two houses in New Bethesda in the Karoo, the vast semi-desert that inspires much
of his creativity. He has even bought his own cemetery plot there. But he admits
that he struggled through a period of creative confusion after Nelson Mandela
became South Africa's first black president.

''After those elections in '94 I reached the point where I said to myself,
How useful, how relevant will I continue to be in the new South Africa?'' Mr.
Fugard said. ''I mean, so much of the energy I used in my writing came from my
sense of anger and outrage with what was happening in apartheid South Africa.
With the big transition, I said to myself: Is that it now? Am I going to be
South Africa's first literary redundancy as it were?''

But Mr. Fugard said a nagging sense of his own mortality persuaded him to
return his attention to the stories and issues that burn here. He turned 69 in
June. His fingers ache sometimes with arthritis when he writes, and time, he
said, is nipping at his heels.

''You know once you hit 70 that you're in the home run, for God's sake,'' Mr.
Fugard said. ''I'm not going to live for another 70 years, that's for sure. So
that sense of time running out, and certainly energy is running out, makes it
imperative that I connect with or reconnect with what is important in my life.''

What matters, Mr. Fugard says, are the triumphs and struggles of ordinary
people still finding their way in this new democracy. The new play, which he has
directed, is peppered with things South African, with phrases in Afrikaans, with
mentions of Five Roses Tea and Koo Apricot Jam and vivid descriptions of the
vast, forbidding Karoo, where the story is set.

Dawid delights in the Afrikaans town names on the highway signs, and Mr.
Fugard does, too, whenever he drives from Johannesburg to New Bethesda and
passes Wonderboom, Rietfontein, Heuningspruit. Mr. Fugard has given up acting
for good, he says, and he may soon give up directing, too. But he is determined
to continue writing and capturing this reality.

''He sees the passing of a certain kind of culture, the Afrikaner culture and
some literary traditions dying,'' said Marianne McDonald, a professor of
classics and theater at the University of California at San Diego, who is
writing a book about Mr. Fugard. ''He's advocating trying to save some of those
things.''

In the play Rebecca suggests that the only identity that matters now is a
black one. She inherits Dawid's house and the stinkwood table, but she wants
none of her white father's things. ''Say goodbye to this house and its ghosts,''
she begs her mother. ''There's nothing left for you here. Come back to the
location with me. There's a real life waiting for you there, with real people,
our people.''

But Allison warns Rebecca not to turn her back on her past. ''If you think
you and your new South Africa don't need it, you are making a terrible
mistake,'' Allison says. ''You are going to need all the love you can get, no
matter where it comes from.''

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